The Mace Group: South Carolina political-media WordPress retainer, 2009-2011

Multi-year WordPress® retainer for a South Carolina political-media firm and its client roster, running from February 2009 through July 2011. The work began in February 2009 with a server migration for the principal’s predecessor consulting practice; when the firm incorporated as Mace Group LLC in 2010, the engagement carried straight over and grew into a standing retainer covering the firm, the principal’s personal site, and several political clients on the firm’s book.

The Mace Group LLC firm website, January 2012 archive snapshot, showing the public-relations / web / design service navigation and a SAIA case-study hero. — The Mace Group LLC firm site, captured from Internet Archive Wayback Machine, January 20, 2012.

Archived capture (January 2012): view macegroupllc.com on the Wayback Machine.

What I built and ran

Migrated FITS News, a high-traffic South Carolina political news site, off shared hosting onto Rackspace. WordPress install on the new infrastructure, DNS cutover, post-migration cache work, and ongoing server-incident response.
Built and maintained sites for the firm and its political clients, including a sitting state legislator later elected to the U.S. Senate, and a sitting U.S. House member at the time of the engagement.
Shipped on-demand feature work: a custom donation-progress widget, campaign iframe embeds, photo galleries, IE8 cross-browser fixes, video embed compatibility, and category-level AdSense filtering driven by editorial taxonomy.
Monthly retainer invoicing across the engagement. Same-weekend turnaround was the norm for urgent ad-policy and editorial changes.

The firm

The Mace Group LLC was a South Carolina digital-strategy and political-media firm. The firm’s principal founded it in 2010 and was later elected to public office.

How the Mace Group network is structured A three-tier site map. At the top, the firm, Mace Group LLC. Below it, five sites the retainer covered: the firm site, the principal’s site, FITS News, a state legislator later elected to the U.S. Senate, and a sitting U.S. House member. Beneath the sites, marked in copper, the shared layer of features the firm built once and reused across every client site: a donation-progress widget, campaign iframe embeds, photo galleries, AdSense filtering by taxonomy, cross-browser and video fixes, and Rackspace hosting with incident response. A POLITICAL-MEDIA NETWORK How the Mace Group network is structured One firm, the sites it ran, and the features it reused across them. The Mace Group LLC South Carolina political-media firm Firm site macegroupllc.com Principal’s site the firm’s founder FITS News political news site State legislator later U.S. Senate U.S. House sitting member SHARED ACROSS THE NETWORK Features the firm built once and reused across every client site. Donation-progress widget Campaign iframe embeds Photo galleries AdSense filtering by taxonomy Cross-browser + video fixes Rackspace hosting + incidents

I mapped the Mace Group network the way I ran it, with the firm at the centre, the sites its retainer covered around it, and the shared features I built once and reused across all of them.

Reference

You rock. Do u think this will suffice the Google adsense gods?
Client, after a same-weekend FITS News fix, June 19, 2011

The engagement also produced active inbound referrals across the South Carolina political-digital network during 2010 and 2011.

One of the campaigns supported under this retainer is documented separately: 2010 U.S. House campaign: South Carolina 1st district (subcontract). Same shape of work as my WordPress development practice today: long-running retainer engagements where same-day turnaround on editorial and platform issues is the contract.